Seamus Hasson's new book

Seamus Hasson, the indefatiguable chairman of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has a new book out:  "The Right to Be Wrong:  Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America."  Seamus is a friend and, in my view, a real religious-freedom hero.  Here is the blurb:

The same war breaks out every December. Some angry group sues to have a nativity scene and menorah taken down from city hall, while another angry group agitates to have them put up. And it’s not just holiday displays that causes this conflict. From public school curricula to zoning permits, no area of civil government seems safe from the ongoing struggle between those who say only the true faith belongs in public and those who say that no faiths do.

Who are the people behind this battle? Kevin Seamus Hasson thinks of them as “the Pilgrims” and the “Park Rangers.” Pilgrims believe that their truths requires them to restrict others' religious freedom. Park Rangers believe that their freedoms require them to make sure others' religious truths remain private. Together, these groups are responsible for the impasse over the role of religion in our public life.

The Right to be Wrong explains why the Pilgrims and Park Rangers are both mistaken. A partisan both of religious expression and personal freedom, Hasson takes the reader on a tour of the American tradition in pointing the way toward a pluralism that grounds religious freedom for all in the truth about each of us. You'll never look at the culture wars quite the same way after reading this book.

Actually, Seamus is the first one who really got me thinking about what it would mean to think about religious freedom in Dignitatis-inspired "anthropological" terms.

Here is a recent interview with him, about the book.  Here is an excerpt:

NRO: What do you think is the biggest threat to religious liberty in the U.S. today?

Hasson: The biggest threat comes from people who think that religious truth is the enemy of human freedom — that the only good religion is a relativist one. When Andrew Sullivan says something called "fundamentalism" is the seedbed of terrorism, he's making this fundamental mistake. At a more amusing level, when school officials ban Valentine's cards (because after all, the holiday is named after St. Valentine), but tell schoolchildren they can still send each other "special person cards," that's the same basic error. In Lansing, Michigan, public-school bureaucrats worried that the Easter Bunny isn't secular enough, now offer "Breakfast with the Special Bunny."

Practically speaking, the threat comes from lawyers, judges, and political elites who think that nativity scenes and menorahs are like secondhand smoke — something that decent people shouldn't be exposed to in the public square.

This theory of our Constitution is not only wrong, it is inhuman. If we frame the battle for religious liberty correctly, both the courts and the vast majority of Americans — and not just Christian conservatives — will be on our side. . . .

Hasson: The second biggest threat is believers who let themselves be goaded into accepting the same false dichotomy between truth and freedom, only on the other side. They fall into the secularists' trap and think that in order to defend the truths of faith they have to oppose the whole idea of human freedom. Like the bureaucrats in a Cobb County, Georgia, jail who tried to prevent Catholic priests from ministering to prisoners because they were afraid some Protestant prisoners would decide to convert. A threatened Becket Fund lawsuit fixed that, but the episode still provided secularists with ammo for their argument that there should be no such things as official chaplains at all.

When people of faith go that route, and accept the secularist premise that truth is opposed to freedom, we surrender the high ground in the culture war.

My goal in The Right to Be Wrong is to persuade all Americans that we can end the culture war honorably. There can be "pluralism without relativism": A vigorous commitment to religious liberty that is not based on the notion that all religions are somehow equally true, but in the truth that all human being have rights. It is moral truth, not moral relativism, that underwrites our freedom, including our religious freedom.

By the way, this is a big issue the Muslim world is wrestling with: Thoughtful Muslims are struggling to understand how they can have an Islamic society without the state imposing Islam coercively.

Some people say they need a Reformation that separates mosque and state. I've argued that what they really need is a Vatican II: They need to discover within the roots of their own tradition the human truth that undergirds religious liberty: Coercing conscience is wrong, because human beings are born with an innate thirst for transcendence, a demand to search for the true and the good, and the need to express that truth in public, not just private. And that can only be done with integrity when it's done freely. That development within Islam would go a long, long way towards guaranteeing the religious freedom of people in Islamic countries. Muslims and Christians can't agree on who God is, but we can agree on who we are.

This is great stuff, I think.

Rick